Parodies of Ballad Criticism | Page 3

Henry Baker in No. XIX of his Universal Spectator, February 15, 1729.[5] And that year too provided the large-scale demonstration of the Dunciad Variorum. The very "matter" of Tom Thumb reappeared under the same light in Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great with the Annotations of H. Scriblerus Secundus, 1731. Addison's criticism of the ballads was scarcely a legitimate object for this kind of attack, but Augustan satire and parody were free and hospitable genres, always ready to entertain more than one kind of "bard and blockhead side by side."[6]
No less a person than George Canning (as a schoolboy) was the author of the second of the two parodies reproduced in the present volume. A group of precocious Eton lads, Canning, J. Hookham Frere, John Smith, and Robert (Bobus) Smith, during the years 1786-1787 produced forty octavo numbers of a weekly paper called The Microcosm. They succeeded in exciting some interest among the literati,[7] were coming out in a "Second Edition" as early as the Christmas vacation of 1786,[8] and in the end sold their copyright for fifty pounds to their publisher, Charles Knight of Windsor.[9] Canning wrote Nos. XI and XII (February 12, 1787), a critique of the "Epic Poem" concerning "The Reformation of the Knave of Hearts."[10] This essay in two parts, running for nearly as many pages as Wagstaffe's archetypal pamphlet, is a much more systematic and theoretically ambitious effort than any predecessor. The Knave of Hearts is praised for its beginning (in medias res), its middle (all "bustle and business"), and its end (full of Poetical Justice and superior Moral). The earlier writers had directly labored the resemblance of the ballads to passages in Homer and Virgil. That method is now hardly invoked at all. Criticism according to the epic rules of Aristotle had been well enough illustrated by Addison on Paradise Lost (see especially Spectator 267) if not by Addison on ballads. The decline of simple respect for the "Practice and Authority" of the ancient models during the neo-classic era, the general advance of something like reasoning in criticism, finds one of its quainter testimonials in the Eton schoolboy's cleverness. He would show by definition and strict deduction that The Knave of Hearts is a "due and proper Epic Poem," having as "good right to that title, from its adherence to prescribed rules, as any of the celebrated master-pieces of antiquity." The post-Ramblerian date of the performance and a further if incidental aim of the satire--a facetious removal from the Augustan coffeehouse conversation--can be here and there felt in a heavy roll of the periods, a doubling and redoubling of the abstractions.[11]
The essay, nevertheless, shows sufficient continuity with the earlier tradition of parody ballad criticism--for it begins by alluding to the Spectator's critiques of Shakespeare, Milton, and Chevy Chase, and near the end of the first number slides into a remark that "one of the Scribleri, a descendant of the famous Martinus, has expressed his suspicions of the text being corrupted." A page or two of irony concerning the "plain and simple" opening of the poem seems to hark back to something more subtle in the Augustans than the Wagstaffian derision, no doubt to Pope's victory over Philips in a Guardian on pastorals. "There is no task more difficult to a Poet, than that of Rejection. Ovid, among the ancients, and Dryden, among the moderns, were perhaps the most remarkable for the want of it."[12]
The interest of these little pieces is historical[13] in a fairly strict sense. Their value is indirect, half accidental, a glancing revelation of ideas concerning simplicity, feeling, genius, the primitive, the historical which run steadily beneath all the ripples during the century that moves from "classic" to "romantic." Not all of Addison's parodists taken together muster as much fun, as such whimsical charm, as Addison himself in a single paragraph such as the one on "accidental readings" which opens the Spectator on the Children in the Wood. But this passage, as it happens, requires only a slightly sophistical application to be taken as a cue to a useful attitude in our present reading. "I once met with a Page of Mr. Baxter under a Christmas Pye.... I might likewise mention a Paper-Kite, from which I have received great Improvement."
William K. Wimsatt, Jr. Yale University
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[Footnote 1: The chief authorities for the history which I am summarizing are W. L. Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, Boston, 1893, Chapter VII; E. K. Broadus, "Addison's Influence on the Development of Interest in Folk-Poetry in the Eighteenth Century," Modern Philology, VIII (July, 1910), 123-134; S. B. Hustvedt, Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain During the Eighteenth Century, New York, 1916.]
[Footnote 2: "Addison's Contribution to Criticism," in R. F. Jones et al.,